Instructions, thoughts, pleas, rants...
Today the 2012 SoMe awards ceremony took place at the Fez Ballroom here in Portland. My company, tenfour agency, won the SoMe Agency of the Year award, mostly (exclusively?) because of the Tweet-a-Beer website that we produced in February/March for SXSW.
Yeah, I built the front-end of that site. Lots of long hours. Lots of gray hair. And now, I get to brag about it.
Indulge me, I rarely get to do this.
…
Okay, I’m done. Time to move on.
Like many web devs, I need to know about Ruby on Rails even if I’m only a front-end guy. It’s a decent framework, actually, but versions can be a problem so I need to use RVM to manage my RoR work environments. So when I got a new MacBook last week, RVM and RoR were high on my list of things to install.
First, some back-story
When browser vendors want to support CSS attributes that are either proprietary or experimental, they frequently isolate their implementations by adding what’s called a vendor prefix to the attribute. This allows vendors to experiment, and it’s generally understood that if/when the attribute becomes fully cooked and part of a CSS standard, the vendor prefix will be dropped.
It had to happen sooner or later, right? Change: it’s one of the constants in our lives, next to breathing and eating and fill-in-the-blank. I’ve been through lots of changes over the years, some good and some bad, but luckily most have been good. This latest change is definitely in the good column.
The change: I just accepted a full-time position at tenfour agency. My title won’t fit easily on a business card, especially the tiny ones they use at tenfour: Senior Front-end Web Developer/Designer. Inhale.
The not-so-happy part of this deal: I need to put Modal to rest. My attention needs to be focused on my new role at tenfour, and working full-time and freelancing don’t mix well (I tried it. It doesn’t work), so one has to go. I’ll miss the loose schedule, the ability to meet people during the day, not having to request vacation time…but I’m trading it all for a rockin’ job with an awesome crew, and for that I’m grateful. I’ve admired tenfour from a distance for some time now so it’s a real kick to be taken under their wing. Good times, totally.
To all my clients here in Oregon and beyond, thank you for helping me get to this point. I appreciate the work, and I appreciate the mix of folks that I’ve worked with. I wish you all the best, and I hope you find someone out there to take my place that’s almost as good as I am. Okay, as good if not better. But we all know “almost” is right, don’t we? Yes, we do.
I’m keeping this website around for a least a little while. Maybe I’ll keep it forever. My LLC is going to be killed within days, but the domain is mine so I may as well continue with it. At least two people read it and I don’t want to make them mad.
Happy new year, folks! It’s already a doozy.
E.
If you’re like me, you sync your Google Calendar (gCal) info with your desktop computer and phone. If you’re using a Mac and an iPhone, that means you’re using iCal. If you’re using iCal, that means you’re using Apple’s incomplete flavor of CalDAV.
What makes Apple’s CalDAV incomplete? It only syncs “pop-up” (gCal) and “message” (iCal) reminders. Anything else is dropped. Best I can tell, even combination reminders (example: “message and sound” in iCal) are dropped. Folks that like getting eMail and SMS reminders are SOL.
It’s nice to get any reminder from a calendar app, especially if you blindly depend on these things to get from one end of the day to the next. For a long time, I have watched in dismay as I set alarms on iCal events only to see them disappear when the gCal sync is completed. Ditto in the other direction. iPhone, ditto again. Now I know to avoid certain kinds of reminders. All is (almost) right in the world.
I only found out about this Apple CalDAV issue today. It’s not earth-shattering or even approaching a nuisance, but still, I hope Apple fleshes out their CalDAV support soon. Seems like an easy enhancement to me, but what do I know.
It looks like Chrome 16 has botched CSS transitions on anchor elements. Best I can tell, once you visit a link that has a CSS transition assigned to it, the transition no longer works on that link.
Exercise: Using Chrome 16, go to the main page on this website and hover over one of the three navigation links that you have not visited. You should see the link color transition from orange to black. Now, click on the link, then after the new page loads go back to the main page. Hover over the same link. No transition.
Setting up CSS transitions for a:visited doesn’t fix this. Safari, “The Other Webkit Browser,” doesn’t have this issue. Smells like a bug to me.
Hey, I’m just trying to help.
I wouldn’t normally blog about stuff like this, but so many folks on the Internet have these things and can’t get into the drive after the enclosure/power-supply/whatever dies, I figure I’m obligated to explain how I did it. I’m funny like that.
Okay, so two gripes in two days is a bit much. I get it. However, I need to vent again and this is my blog.
Folks who spend time working with or around designers eventually hear a variation of the following: “There should be a license for designers.” Specifically, a credential should be created that establishes a designer as being superb at his/her craft, primarily to weed out those considered to be somewhere south of superb.
I couldn’t agree less.
For those of you who are watching, I have a bit of news: effective immediately and continuing through the remainder of 2011, I will not be taking on new freelance work. If you slipped in before I announced this, huzzah! You’re in! However, no new work will be taken until at least the beginning of 2012.
I can explain in detail why I made this decision, but I’ll let you ask if you really want to know. It’s nothing bad, just a time and availability thing.
Thanks for understanding. I’ll announce when I’m back in freelance action, don’t worry. In the meantime, stay dry, okay?